The 2023 Fringe feels like it’s been a big moment for clowning-based US comedy, and the late-night nexus to what may or may not constitute a cohesive scene is revue night Stamptown.
Where other late-night mixed bills are typically comics doing bits of their own acts, Stamptown is distinguished by the fact that its core performers have created their own Stamptown-specific alter egos, notably Jack Tucker as brash, shock jock-style compere Zack Zucker, Josh Glanc as Zack’s sweet, feckless pal and number one fan Spanish Fuckboi, Steffan Hands as a rubbish vampire, and DylanBrand as… a guy who rollerblades around to the strains of ‘Ridin’ Solo’ by Jason Derulo, accompanied by some gimp-type figures who Tucker/Zucker occasionally pretends to gun down.
At its best it’s glorious chaos, largely because it’s so deliciously random: none of the characters feel like they could hold a whole show, but together they work beautifully, especially Glanc’s blithe Spanish Fuckboi, whose total lack of comprehension of what is actually going on is a delight to behold.
It does, inevitably, feel like a boy’s club, and while I struggled to gauge the precise levels of irony at play in Zucker’s alpha dawg shtick, his character does rather cement the sense of it all being a bit fratty.
To be clear there’s nothing misogynist about Zucker, he’s just very loud and given to the use of bombastic sound effects. And there were female performers on the night I saw it, including headliner Elf Lyons doing unspeakable things to a watermelon. But as she doesn’t have a special Stamptown character she feels a bit adrift from the central concept.
At its best it’s a deliciously weird late-night treat with some gloriously WTF characters; at its worst, it just feel a tiny bit Howard Stern.